The Unity Runtime Fee is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2024, and it’s been universally panned by developers on social media since its announcement earlier today.
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For instance, if a free-to-play game has made $200,0000 in the last 12 months but has millions of people installing it, the developer could end up owing Unity more than the profit earned from in-game purchases.
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Others are worried this could lead some smaller developers who built their games on Unity to pull titles from digital storefronts to prevent more people from racking up downloads.
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“I bet Steam, Epic, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft will love having waves of developers pulling their games,” writes Forest from Among Us developer Innersloth Games. “Innersloth has always paid Unity appropriately for licenses and services we use. I’m not a discourse guy, but this is undue and will force my hand.”
Other developers are actually asking people online to not install their game built in Unity, with Paper Trail developer Huenry Hueffman writing, “if you buy our Unity game, please don’t install it… demos also count, dont install this demo, you’ll literally bankrupt me”.
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Unity also clarified that the fee will not apply to charity games or charity bundles. Unity defended the pricing model, saying it’s designed to only charge developers who have already found financial success.
We only succeed when you succeed. Our 5% royalty model only kicks in after your first $1M in gross revenue, meaning that if you make $1,000,001 you owe us 5 cents. And this is per title!
Also, revenue generated from the Epic Games Store will be excluded from that 5% royalty.
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Unity has been under pressure lately, laying off hundreds of employees in the first half of 2023. Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing. Featured in everything from Cuphead to Beat Saber to Pokemon Go, it has been lauded for ease of use. However, trust in the platform has been declining over the years, leading many developers to look to alternatives.
Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing.
Classic CEO brainrot. There’s more to life than just maximizing profit.
Maybe this will be the kick in the rear that gets people to drop them enmasse. I’d definitely explore the other options for any new projects I was starting.
Even if they drop this fee, is it really worth the headache in the future when they try something again?
No, Unity has always been an inferior engine to others such as Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, Blender, etc. In fact, the Unreal Engine 3 UDK became free well over a decade ago, and it’s basically Unity if Unity weren’t the scummy corporate vampires they’ve always been.
Let’s not pretend Epic aren’t also scummy corporate vampires
I’m sorry but Blender game engine was pretty cumbersome to use. It was officially dropped awhile ago and last I heard it was picked up by the community
In a capitalist oligarchy? There’s really not.
Well fuck me, apparently. The Adobe and Sibelius fees already break me, and I’ve invested enough in Unity assets (not to mention the learning curve) to get a game close to preproduction, and this could drive me out.
I’m a tiny Dev just trying to break into VR, console, and mobile by myself, and am dirt poor with no support, just my knowledge and talent. I’m working on three beta projects, but this makes me scared to continue on Unity.
I’m a good designer and developer with industry experience, but my health has forced me into smaller Indy projects. I put all my eggs in Unity’s basket and now it feels like they’re ditching me just at the point I was ready for production.
God dammit. :(
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The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they’ve changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you’re ready to release.
So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?
Yes, this, too. :(
It doesn’t seem right that they can retroactively change their terms and just decide you owe them money. I’m guessing this is legal since they are doing it anyways?
It’s really no different than a service upping their subscription fee or a grocery store raising the price of eggs. There’s no law that says the price will remain the same forever. You can of course add it to the terms of a contract, but it’s at your (in this case Unity’s) own discretion.
Here’s their Pricing Change FAQ.
The main difference is that if you built your product on their platform, you don’t have the option to pick a different vendor for what you’ve already built like you would for subscriptions or eggs. It feels much more akin to extortion to me.
You built your product on their platform and agreed to the terms they set. Thats a level of commitment you put in. Them changing it afterwards is forcing you to agree to new terms that you wouldn’t agree to if you weren’t forced.
If the issue is using their servers, or keeping the runtime code updates, there should at least be the option of self hosting or locking into an older version.
Having said all that, I know very little about vendor contracts and don’t doubt you when you say legally its the same as any other price change. It feels different because of the lack of choice.
Oh, I’ll keep going, for sure! (…with one eye on developments.) But now I also need to prepare contingencies if their licensing goes the way of Avid, Adobe, and most recently Reddit and the bird one.
Something major might have to change and I can’t be blindsided by it, so I have to carve out time to deal with this, anyhow.
For future projects you may want to consider Godot or Stride. Free and Open Source.
Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that isn’t FOSS/non-profit goes down the shitter these days in the name of profit. It really does feel like the only way to avoid getting fucked over is to completely ditch commercial stuff.
Our world sure does work, eh?
Stallman was right all along.
Yeah, I hope stuff like this shows people the value of FOSS
It’s not like nobody warned you Unity was bad, they’ve been hounding developers forever. I’ve personally been warning people to not touch unity and instead use the vastly superior Unreal Engine, ever since the UDK days. This isn’t the fall of Unity, it’s mid descent.
Kick 'em while they’re down
Jump ship to Musescore and Affinity while you’re at it my friend.
They must have lost their minds. Bankrupt or even pay Unity back for a successful game you made and finished months ago? I hope they get legal action.
Seriously. If they were changing the terms going forward, that’d at least be defensible, but trying to make it apply to everything that’s ever been made is just nonsensical.
Even then it would be pretty bad for a lot of devs. If you’ve been developing a game in unity for years, you can’t just easily change engines just because they’ve changed the rules of using their engine.
I agree with you; they’d have to give plenty of notice that the changes were coming and maybe even offer exemptions for developers who can show they were working on something significantly before the announcement… I don’t think there’s any way they could reasonably do it that would avoid all backlash, but this just seems like the absolute worst way to handle it.
So they owe devs on all previous installs? Like back payment? Or just going forward if you’ve ever used Unity?
Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)
The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.
If they can change the terms of games already released and ask for a % per install, what’s stopping them from just asking for 100% and saying suck it bitches.
Just a reminder that other game engines exist. Some are even free and just as powerful, if not more.
Also stride!
And O3DE, formally Amazon Lumberyard / CryEngine
I’m interested in Flax game engine.
https://flaxengine.com/
Stride looks great, thanks for the link.
I know nothing about game dev.
Is godot really just as powerful? I’ve heard of it, but I always thought it was for 2d stuff.
Godot is a passable engine. It doesn’t have a massive pile of money behind it, but it’ll generally do most things adequately.
Honestly - and I may be biased as I’m a AAA dev who works with the engine - Unreal is really the way to go. Reasonable pricing on a powerful engine. The main issue is that it’s bloated as hell and there’s a learning curve… but if you’re an indie, it’s just as usable as Unity. Plus if you wanted to get into AAA development someday, Unreal is super popular and used everywhere.
It shines in 2D where Unity falters, yes. But it’s perfectly capable of doing 3D competently. It’s shaders and lightning pipelines that are a bit rough on the edges, but that can be overcome with time with more brainpower coming in to contribute. The scripting is also far more robust than the hodgepodge that Unity tries to pass off as C#. The great advantage is that Godot is a non-profit foundation with a transparent governance model. Not a predatory venture capitalist behemoth like Unity.
It’s been really great for 2d, 4.0 made it really good for 3d, and it’s even decent for general GUI applications, as an engine it feels ready for wider adoption to me.
I think it’s not up to Unreal quality, but for the vast majority of indie games I believe it’s enough.
This doesn’t help people who were already knee deep in a project.
I might invest in some cheap liquor instead.
Unity is Unreal’s biggest marketer now, it seems…
Curious if some of the many internal AAA engines out there might start to get shopped around as a new alternate to UE. Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all have a few in house engines that at least on paper seem viable for branching out — the biggest obstacle would be support, I suspect. Which isn’t a trivial obstacle, to be clear.
idTech is due for a resurgence. Maybe Valve could even get a revival in usage of Source.
I’d love to see Capcom license the RE Engine with how nice and smooth all the games made on that have been
The aftermath from its main audience, mobile devs, is going to be biblical.
My hope would be that this encourages open source engine usage but it’ll probably simply make Unreal Engine more popular instead.
To be fair, while unreal isn’t FOSS, it’s source code is at least openly viewable so devs would find it easier to make easily transferable alternatives
Also if theirs a engine bug you can crack it open and fix it yourself, handy if you’re not a AAA studio who has epic Devs on speed dial. Though I believe you do have to share any code alterations with epic if it’s hosted on a private repo
I can see why you would think that, but there’s alot of stuff unreal just isn’t that good at, things like 2d games are a massive struggle to work with in unreal, so it’ll gain more popularity, but mainly from devs making 3d games with a focus on high graphics
Godot is a pretty good alternative for 2D games
I’m confused. I’ve never licensed a game engine, but I figure you’d write what charges you pay into the contract, and as far as I know, you can’t just add additional charges in later without renegotiating the contract. At least, you’d have no way to enforce those. So I’m sort of at a loss how this is even supposed to work.
The game engine is licensed as a subscription. When January 1st rolls around and the dev’s meed to renew their subscription it will have these new terms. Their options are to accept this or to never update their games again.
Makes sense. I hope the unity guys come to their senses. This whole thing seems rather self-destructive on the company’s part. Unity is far from being a monopoly, with one competitor being free and open source (Godot). And pulling stunts like these, even if you walk them back later, does not engender trust.
For sure. Proprietary software, and especially subscription licensed proprietary software, is a blight.
Oh, but already completed games that dont want to make more updates dont need to pay this fee right?
As I understand it yes, that is correct.
I forgot it was John Riccitiello at the helm of Unity these days. That explains a lot.
Also quite interesting that he’s offloaded ~$2mil worth if Unity shares in the past year too
Whoah spez, are you the CEO at Unity now as well? Impressive
May your golden parachute have secretly been stuffed with lead you greedy abusive piece of shit. Fuck these bait and switch MBAs.
Just read some details, it’s a monthly fee too? Wouldn’t that really screw over single-player games which don’t do recurring revenue?
Good thing i switched from unity to godot a while ago
i have a couple Unity games that are close to shipping, i think i’ll hold off on that and rewrite in Godot instead. I was already considering it since working with Godot is a thousand times more pleasant than Unity anyway.
This article has some new quotes and details. I know we have the other thread going, but this would get buried over there.
Can someone explain to me why they might have gone with this strange pricing model instead of the very simple revenue sharing model that Epic uses?
Because a lot of mobile games are made in Unity, and mobile has a higher rate of people who install and then uninstall without really playing the game. People also install things by mistake on mobile, thinking they’re something else.
So by charging based on installs, they’re able to squeeze developers a lot more (especially mobile game developers). Competitor engines like Unreal don’t run very well on mobile.
Something something $$$.
But yeah, revenue sharing makes a ton more sense. Maybe have a per-seat option up to $X in revenue, and a revenue percent above that amount.
They pushed this change with the always online dev kit. I believe the price change is a smoke screen for the other changes. Soon they might step back on this decision.
